True or Falsetto: This opera festival is a game changer

“Seven operatic happenings staged over the course of twelve days in six venues across the city. This unprecedented civic experiment transforms Philadelphia into an urban stage, where diverse audiences gather to share an experience and amplify human connectedness.”

From September 14 to 25, Opera Philadelphia and its collaborators will offer more than 25 performances of seven different pieces at multiple venues across Philadelphia. The event will transform the city into a massive urban stage. Starting off this season, the festival will be at some of the biggest venues the city has to offer, the Academy of Music, the Perelman Theater at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Barnes Foundation, the Wilma Theater, and Independence National Historical Park.

Head out for music like you’ve never experienced before at this year’s Opera Philadelphia.

Mozart’s masterful comedy about love, truth, and the pursuit of enlightenment, Prince Tamino sets off to rescue Pamina, the beautiful daughter of the Queen of the Night, from the mysterious Sarastro. But with the help of the bird catcher Papageno and three Spirits as their guide, Tamino discovers an even bigger adventure and is united with his love along the way.

Set in London in the 1880s, this highly suspenseful and theatrical opera interweaves several narratives: the trial of the titular heroine for the poisoning of her husband; a series of brutal murders committed by a Jack the Ripper-style killer; the spirited world of an English music hall; and, finally, some “guest appearances” by luminaries from the Victorian Age. Elizabeth Cree is a work that combines the factual with the fictive and the historical with the imaginary.

On the run after a series of tragic incidents, five North Philly teens find refuge in an abandoned, condemned house in West Philadelphia. This self-defined family is assuaged and even inspired by the ghosts who inhabit this home and begin to see their squatting as a matter of destiny and resistance rather than urgent fear.

One of the city’s most iconic civic spaces, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is the setting for this site-specific double-bill featuring Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and I Have No Stories To Tell You, by composer Lembit Beecher and librettist Hannah Moscovitch. Monteverdi’s timely 1638 tale of the Christian soldier Tancredi who battles with a Muslim soldier, actually his lover Clorinda in disguise, is staged in the museum’s medieval stone cloister, with its carved limestone cornices and 12th century fountain. Beecher and Moscovitch’s response to Monteverdi’s work, a modern tale of a returned soldier struggling to readjust to her home life and haunted by war, follows in the museum’s soaring Great Stair Hall. Together, War Stories presents a jarring, complex view of war and its costs.

Works of art jump off the gallery walls and into the action as the museum is transformed, with the voices of the Opera Philadelphia Chorus drawing the audience through a mystical world of hallucinatory vividness. As a fully immersive performance, The Wake World challenges understandings of art, opera, and the self—in a way audiences are unlikely to forget.

Globally celebrated soprano, praised by The New York Times for her “alluringly dark-hued voice, with its distinctive timbre, expressive vibrato and gleaming top notes.” The sincerity and intensity that she brings to the stage as one of the most prominent sopranos of her generation have won her accolades from critics and loyalty from passionate fans.

Mozart’s screwball comedy, The Marriage of Figaro! ‭Before the broadcast, enjoy a new Family Fun Zone with child-friendly activities plus our ‭popular photo booth and a lineup of Philadelphia’s finest food trucks! Watch pre-show videos, including interviews with cast members and a ‭screening of the classic Looney Tunes cartoon, Rabbit of Seville.

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